The Digest. 03.19.08.

Fuck Art: Let’s be Hedge Fund Managers by Marc Johns. See the full set of his Post-It note drawings, as well as his website.

• It is the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In honor of this profoundly sad moment: Four photo essays by Magnum photographers about war. (The commentary on the one by Thomas Dworzak is especially sublime.)
• In related news: Iraq’s National Museum will not reopen.
• Art Review Lead of the Day: “You know that embarrassed feeling you get at dinner parties when one of the guests is making a complete prat of themselves, and everybody knows it but them, and the humane thing to do would be to get them to stop, but you are not your brother’s keeper and, besides, they probably wouldn’t listen to you anyway? That’s the feeling I had going around the Barbican’s excruciating attempt to create a Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art. What a cringe-making display of creative curatorship.”
• How to create your own font.
• Thinking about the Milky Way.
• Graff of the Day: Gualicho in Buenos Aires.
• JR goes big in Brussels.
• A round-up (heh heh, get it?) of spherical architecture. (Richard: You forgot this one.)
• Bad Banking News is Good News for the NYC Skyline: The Bear Stearns collapse means JP Morgan won’t be able to erect fugly headquarters.
• Trippy stairs.
• New Book: Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects, chronicling the work of German Jewish architects and designers who worked in 1930s Germany.
• Recurso’s low-impact environmental housing in Mexico City.
• Beer can butterflies.
• Whitney Museum to get beaucoup dinero from its chairman, Leonard Lauder.
• Madrid’s Caixaforum debuts with paintings from the Uffizi.
• Public Service Announcement.
• Photos from CA Boom V, a West Coast design show, which includes a shot of $1000 Shepard Fairey skate decks from Bottega Montana.
• Not a rhetorical question: What does Lever House smell like?
• The Top 10 Weirdest Rock ‘n Roll Deaths. (Via Coudal.)
• Wooden Buddha sets auction record for Japanese art during Christie’s sale.
• In related art industrial average news: A pickled fish by Damien Hirst, which hung for years in a fish ‘n chip shop in Leeds, will now be sold at auction. Scrumptious!
• W.H. Auden gets goes down.
• German graphic design on Flickr. (Via Coudal.)
• Novelists strike fails to affect nation whatsoever. (Via The Elegant Variation.)
• Your moment of live animal shows.